Understanding feed count fluctuations

By Daniel Scocco - 0 minute read

The Feedburner users out there will probably have already noticed the fluctuations that their feed count suffer over the time. Moreover, if you pay attention you will notice that during week days when you pump many posts the feed count will peak, while on weekends and on days that you do not post that number will decline (sometimes heavily, for the despair of the blogger).

There is simple explanation for this fact, though. Feedburner delivers your feed to a myriad of RSS readers. There are basically two types of RSS readers: web-based readers like Bloglines or MyYahoo and on-demand readers like FireFox Live Bookmarks. The web-based readers will pull your feed whether the subscriber opens his reader page or not, hence why the feed count for web-based readers is stable over the time. On-demand readers, however, will only be counted if the user actually accesses the feed on a particular day.

Here is a quote from Eric Olson, responsible of the Publisher Services for Feedburner:

We can only track the subscriber we seeÂ in a given day. If someone doesn’t open their feedreader or live bookmarks than we can’t count them that day and won’t count them on your stats.

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20 Responses to “Understanding feed count fluctuations”

Jack Yanon February 28, 2010 10:01 am

My fluctuations are sometimes plus or minus six people, which is fine. However, they are regularly 300 (75 per cent) of my readership. Iâ€™m not sure this can be explained by the above. The 300 drops do not happen on set days of the week, either, but appear to be totally random.

Daily Good Tipson May 26, 2009 7:35 pm

my new blog has only 60 subscribers

Bang Kritikuson January 27, 2009 2:08 am

Thanks for your information. I give great interesting for this blog. Good.

Bas – Istanbul Expaton October 04, 2008 9:56 am

It can really annoy me sometimes. They should offer a way to exclude the on-demand reader count from the Feedburner count.

Or to just split the two up.

SEO Geniuson June 29, 2008 2:48 pm

Great post, i have been wondering this for sometime now 🙂

Tom Johnsonon October 06, 2007 10:20 am

Thanks for the post. I’ve been wondering about the reasons for Feedburner’s fluctuations for months!

listikalon June 04, 2007 10:53 am

Excellent post on the fluctuation. It seems like I’ve read this before, but this really nails it on the head.

Aaron Bobrinkon February 02, 2007 2:21 am

Nice to know this about feedburner. My blog is too new to have fluctuations in its count, but I have noticed it in other blogs.